March 04, 2005

Idiot week

It is idiot week on TV. I just heard Bill Maher (HBO) say that vaccines don’t prevent disease. Also, that Pasteur recanted on his deathbed. So what? Modern medicine relies on more recent studies than just Pasteur - his theories have been confirmed and improved upon, even if he did recant. But wait - he didn't recant. In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny: “what a maroon!”

Just look at this from UNICEF. The vaccine didn't have any effect on Polio, Bill? Really?

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Do you know which episode it is? Maher has transcripts of all his "Real Time with Bill Maher" shows on his website. I'd like to find the quote. I searched the two most recent ones with the word "vaccine" and couldn't find anything. I guess if it was Friday's show, maybe the transcripts are not up yet.

For someone who is a self-proclaimed "rational" or "skeptical" person who views religion as a mental illness, Bill Maher is very credulous about many other things. For example, he's a big booster of PETA (and here). He seems to swallow PETA's claims that animal research does little good very unskeptically or to have little problem with PETA's ties with terrorist organizations like the Earth Liberation Front.

I'm sending you a link to my blog, with some pictures of my 49 year old husband, who did not get the vaccine before he got polio in 1958.

If the polio vaccine didn't save us, then why are there not more people walking around like him? His clothes hide the severity of his problem. He weighs 95 lbs (or less, the hospital last week said he weighed 92 lbs) he used to weight 98 lbs. He's 5'4'' on one foot, 5'0'' on the other, depending on what day you measure him, you might get an extra or less inch on either foot. Had he not had polio, he'd have been 6 foot 3, at least, that's what the orthopedic docs say.

My 15 year old came home from school last week and looked at his dad and said " are you SURE the holocaust victims weren't given the polio virus dad? Because, minus the scoliosis, you look JUST like them!"

The show was Friday March 4. It’s on again tonight (9.40pm) – I’ll tape it and write out the exact transcript by tomorrow. It was on near the end, just before the “New Rules” segment, if anyone wants to watch it.

Thanks for your comments on the blog, btw. It’s a new project for me, as you can see.

Thanks
for the link to your site. Obviously I’m
sorry for what your husband went through, and still clearly suffers
for, but
thanks for reminding us how lucky we are now to be free of these
illnesses
today. Free in the western world,
anyway. Many people on developing
countries such as Nigeria are still suffering
from anti-vax
scare
stories:

"Polio
infections surged last year in Africa after Islamic leaders
in northern Nigeria led a boycott against
immunizations, claiming the polio vaccine was part of a U.S.-led plot
to render
Nigeria's Muslims infertile or
infect
them with AIDS.

"The
clerics finally relented, but not before the disease spread from Nigeria. The 2004 worldwide
polio case
count reached 1,185 last year, compared with 784 in 2003. Nigeria accounted for over 60
percent of
the 2004 tally."

I remember hearing about that, and only saw a couple of news stories, they literally triggered nightmares in my husband. I think, had we watched more, he would have desensitized to it, but the initial reaction caused him to have dreams of an iron lung (which he spent an absurd amount of time in.) So, I just switched channels when the topic would come up. Our computer was down at the time, so I couldn't get my news on line.

OK, here is the transcript, copied from the TV, of what Maher actually said. Thanks to “Donks” at the JREF Forum for writing it all out. I only checked it.

Bill Maher: Why do we need so much healthcare if we weren't sick? And why are we sick? What is the main thing we do to ourselves? Eat.

Janet Reno: One of the main things we do to ourselves is we do not take care of our children when they come into this world by providing proper vaccinations, proper preventative medical care, proper strong supportive healthcare for infants and children in this country.

BM: I don't believe in vaccination either. That's a... well, that's a... what? That's another theory that I think is flawed, and that we go by the Louis Pasteur theory, even though Louis Pasteur renounced it on his own deathbed and said that Beauchamp was right: it's not the invading germs, it's the terrain. It's not the mosquitoes, it's the swamp that they are breeding in.

JR: What are you going to do about smallpox? (something of the sort, crowd was clapping)

BM: What am I going to do about smallpox?

JR: Mmm huh.

BM: Not go to the chicken farm. But eh... no.

Dave Foley: You gotta say, the polio vaccine turned out well. You know...

Dr. Bernardine Healy: I think there... I mean I think it's great theatre to, when you're well, to say "Oh all those sick people, let's dismiss them." But you know, when you're sick there's nothing better than having a good medical establishment.

BM: But why do they get sick? You think it's normal that people need this ammount of drugs?

Dr.BH: Well I think that people get sick and we don't know entirely why they get sick, and the older, they get the sicker they get. Every 10 years that you add on to your life you have a higher chance of getting sick. And you get atherosclerosis, you get cancer... I mean the notion...

BM: Why...?

Dr.BH: ...that somehow when you get sick it's your fault...

BM: It's the...

Dr.BH:...it's the wrong attitude. It's not your fault. You don't have a guilt trip because you get sick. People get sick. You know, they say that all around the world people think that death is inevitable. In the United States of America we think it's an option.

BM (at the same time as the last sentence): You're in denial.

Dr.BH: I mean, death is not an option.

BM: You're in denial, about I think is a key fact, which is it is the at... people get sick because of an aggregate toxicity, because their body has so much poison in it, from the air, the water... Yes, much of it is not our fault and we can't control it. But a lot of it we can and even the food people think is good for them, is bad, and I'm not presenting myself as a paradigm. I do cruddy things to my body too and I enjoy them. But when I do them, I'm not in denial. I'm not eating fat free cheese and saying: "You know what, I'm healthy for eating this." I'm saying: "Oh yeah, this is chemical goop and it’s killing me."

Pasteur was one of the great scientists. But he had nothing to do with vaccination, that was Jenner, who listened to a milkmaid. Pasteur conquered Rabies, and essntially the same treatment is still used. It is still deadly, recently a man died from bat rabies, because there is no serum available for it.

What happened to smallpox? We know it didn't just go away -- the vaccine was just the medical establishment's attempt to take credit for a process they could not control, like a charlatan with an atlas who hurls incantations at the sun just before an eclipse. So it's hiding. But where? This is a problem for logic -- from Greek "logos", "word", suffix "-ic", "relating to". So let's look at the word "smallpox". It is composed of two English words, "small", which means small, and pox, meaning pox. Yes, but small as compared to what? Chicken pox? Nobody says "smaller than a chicken". Smaller than a breadbox, maybe, but that's not a kind of pox. So we already know there's another kind of pox involved. Why did the small pox go away, and where did they go? Let's start with the second question. The Indians made a god of smallpox, so if I was one, I'd go there. All right, so we have a horde of smallpox disappearing somewhere in India. How? They must have gone underground, because you won't see them on top of it. So there's a slew of smallpox hiding underground in India for years and years. And they're not sitting there, immobile and unchanging like statues; that would make no sense. So they're changing... Now you see the light of reason at the end of the logical tunnel. You don't want to be around when we find out what a largepox looks like, is what I'm saying.